We Are the Champions!

Electrical and computer engineering students built a robot for the Institute
of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Southeast Region 3 Conference (SECON)
2007 competition. Thirty-seven student teams from the southeast region
were asked to build a robot that could play a modified version of say
ping-pong, tennis, and basketball.

The independently operated robot stands
about a foot tall and uses computer code and sensors to move within the
white line boundaries that looks much like that of a tennis court or ping-pong
table. Staying inbounds on the court, the robot then uses a camera to
recognize a basketball hoop that is painted red. The camera computer program
talks to the motion code of the robot to let it know when it is lined
up to shoot a ping-pong ball into the basketball hoop. The team with the
robot shooting the most balls into the basket in the quickest amount of
time advances to the next round of competition.

The double elimination tournament was set-up much like the NCAA "Road
to the Final Four." The BCoE student team's robot won 12 rounds
of competition to capture the IEEE REGION 3 CHAMPIONSHIP title.